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Laughter and the distinct levels of interpersonality
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Earlier studies of attention in infancy and of problem solving in young children provided support for a "discrepancy hypothesis," which proposes an inverted-U relationship between amount of discrepancy between existing cognitive structures and current stimulus input and amount of pleasure derived from the successful processing of that input. The present studies were designed in an effort to demonstrate a comparable relationship with respect to children's appreciation of humor. Children varying in the degree of (or length of time since) acquisition of conservation and class inclusion concepts were presented jokes in which the humor depicted derived from the violation of these 2 concepts. The results indicated that humor appreciation was greatest soon after the concepts were acquired, with reduced appreciation shown both by subjects who did not possess the concepts and by subjects who had mastered them several years previously. Support was claimed for the view than an optimal moderate amount of cognitive challenge is associated with maximal appreciation of humor.
The paper is devoted to the study of humor as an important pragmatic phenomenon bearing on cognition, and, more specifically, as a cooperative mode of non-bona-fide communication. Several computational models of humor are presented in increasing order of complexity and shown to reveal important cognitive structures in jokes. On the basis of these limited implementations, the concept of a full-fledged computational model for the understanding and generation of humor is introduced and discussed in various aspects. The model draws upon the authors ' General Theory of Verbal Humor, with its six knowledge resources informing a joke, and on SMEARR, a sophisticated semantic-network-based computational lexical environment. The relevance of the approach to the interpretation, generation, and cognitive structure of humor is discussed in the broader context of the nature of the cooperative non-bona-fide modes of communication.
Neither an infant one week old nor a snail is a rational creature. If the infant survives long enough, he will probably become rational, while this is not true of the snail. If we like, we may say of the infant from the start that he is a rational creature because he will probably become rational if he survives, or because he belongs to a species with this capacity. Whichever way we talk, there remains the difference, with respect to rationality, between the infant and the snail on one hand, and the normal adult person on the other; this difference is discussed here.